1985 | Chateau la Mission Haut Brion

Full-throttle aromatics and flavours that lead with earthen, herby fruit, nuanced with cedar, graphite and attractive savoury notes. Plenty of richness and structure to be enjoyed.

Reviews:

• Wine Advocate: A dark plum/garnet color reveals a pinkish lightening at the edge, and the bouquet reveals plenty of smoke, camphor, charcoal, graphite, sweet kirsch and blacker fruit aromas intermixed with meaty, sauteed mushroom, cedar and spicy notes.

• John Gilman: The 1985 vintage of La Mission is simply stellar, and though the wine is still on the youthful side, it has enormous potential. The bouquet on this excellent wine is still a tad primary, but offers up great purity and nascent complexity in its mix of cassis, sweet dark berries, a touch of menthol, dark soil tones, cigar smoke, a deft touch of new wood and a bit of upper register mintiness, that defines La Mission in 1985. On the palate the wine is pure, full-bodied and shows stunning depth at the core, with beautiful balance and focus, modest tannins and great length and grip on the impeccable finish. This will be an extremely velvety and seductive vintage of La Mission at its apogee, but it is still a bit on the young side for primetime drinking and I would keep it in the cellar for several more years before starting to drink it in earnest. It is a great and very classic vintage for this great property.

Producer Information

Château La Mission Haut-Brion is an estate in the Pessac-Léognan appellation in the northern Graves, a few miles southwest of Bordeaux's city center. Its near-neighbor and sister estate Château Haut-Brion was the only estate from the region featured in the 1855 Bordeaux Classification, but La Mission Haut-Brion (rated a Graves Grand Cru in the 1959 rankings) is often judged and priced as the equal of Haut-Brion and the other first growths. The wine is particularly known for its fruit intensity, rounded, generous texture and silky tannins, and has received multiple 100-point ratings from American critic Robert Parker. La Mission Haut-Brion sees 18-22 months aging in barrel, with 80 percent new oak. Between 6000 and 7000 cases are produced each year. La Chapelle de La Mission Haut-Brion has been the second wine since 2006, when it replaced Château La Tour Haut-Brion. The estate also produces two Semillon-based white wines: La Mission Haut-Brion Blanc (formerly Laville Haut-Brion) and, since 2009, La Clarté de Haut-Brion. The latter acts as a combined second wine for La Mission Haut-Brion and Haut-Brion Blanc. The estate takes its name from the Lazarite missionaries who owned it from 1682 until the French Revolution. It has been owned since 1983 by Domaine Clarence Dillon, the owner of Haut-Brion.

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